 Subjects -> SOCIOLOGY (Total: 553 journals)
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- Valuation and Critique in “The Good Economy” Part 1
Authors: Kristin Asdal, Liliana Doganova
Pages: 1 - 15
PubDate: 2025-02-26
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2025.12.1.1-15
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2025)
- Water plus what' On the politics of addition in the good economy of
climate adaptation
Authors: Daniel Nordstrand Frantzen
Pages: 16 - 39
Abstract: In this article, I trace the transformation of climate adaptation in Denmark into a good economy. Empirically, I explore a shift in rainwater management from building sewers underground to making cheaper solutions on the surface. Moreover, these solutions are expected not only to handle rainwater but also to “add value,” particularly recreational value. I call this approach the politics of addition, emphasizing that it entails a specific set of principles for doing good while adapting to climate change. Theoretically, I relate this politics of addition to the concept of the good economy. By drawing on the orders of worth perspective, I emphasize how good economies are compromises between multiple versions of the good and that these compromises need to be stabilized through so-called composite objects. Relying mainly on document material supplemented by interviews, I identify several composite objects in climate adaptation, including tools of valuation as well as specific projects. By analyzing these composite objects, I describe how the politics of addition compromises several versions of the good in climate adaptation, eventually promising that adding value will ease “the battle for space” in cities by composing economic, technical, and recreational value into the same facilities.
PubDate: 2025-02-26
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2025.12.1.16-39
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2025)
- Good Economies of Carbon Offsetting: The cyclical dynamics of valuation
and critique in voluntary carbon markets
Authors: Kamilla Karhunmaa
Pages: 40 - 66
Abstract: Voluntary carbon markets are based on the idea that the carbon credits sold in markets are both the same, or climatically equivalent to one another, and different, reflecting how, when, where, and by whom they have been produced. This article examines how market actors deal with this tension and value units that are both commensurate and differentiated. Based on existing literature, interviews, and document analysis, I identify and present three instantiations of a good economy of carbon offsetting from the 2000s onwards. Each phase shows how valuation processes iterate between commensuration and differentiation. This is achieved through the development of elaborate sets of complementary valuation practices and tools, such as methodologies for valuing co-benefits, impact scores and overcompensation factors for securing climate impacts, and carbon removal crediting methodologies. While critique is central to driving the move from one good economy to another, this article also shows how the valuation practices of voluntary carbon markets appear locked into repetitive cycles of critique and reform, with recurrent disputes emerging over what to weigh and value and how. This poses new questions concerning how to critique such markets and their valuation practices.
PubDate: 2025-02-26
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2025.12.1.40-66
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2025)
- Making Good Economies with Bad Economic Instruments: A brief history of
wind power’s changing economies
Authors: José Ossandón, Trine Pallesen, Peter Karnøe, Susse Georg
Pages: 67 - 95
Abstract: This article examines how notions of the good are entangled with instruments of valuation in the case of wind power in Denmark. Analytically, we develop what we tentatively call a comparative actantial approach to the study of policy instruments. Empirically, we inspect three support schemes introduced between 1979 and 1999 by the Danish state to foster the development of wind power. The comparative inspection shows wind power's notable shifts in what we call its actantial status: the same character appears as a very different kind of agent in the very different good economies for wind power portrayed by the instruments. The article contributes to two different but related literatures: it contributes to recent intersection between science and technology studies and economic geography inspecting the variable ontologies of energy resources, and it contributes to the discussion in this theme issue about instruments of valuation and the good economy.
PubDate: 2025-02-26
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2025.12.1.67-95
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2025)
- Bio-Efficiency: On the valorisation of innovation in the bioeconomy
Authors: Oscar Krüger, Alexander Paulsson
Pages: 96 - 118
Abstract: This article discusses a concept that institutions from the OECD to the EU increasingly employ in their response to the ecological crisis: The bioeconomy, wherein materials for economic activity would be bio-based and renewable. As a present-day project, the bioeconomy translates the critique of (fossil) carbon into patterns of (material) resource use and (economic) resource allocation, not least through a new valorisation of innovation in the form of public– private partnerships. Yet where literature on the bioeconomy scrutinizes innovation, the concrete link between funders and funded has seldom been subject to focused analytical inquiry. This link is essential to the structure of the bioeconomy project. To broach the arrangements by which efforts to conjure a (bio-)economy underwrite specific patterns of value distribution, this article asks: Which discursive and conceptual resources are deployed to define the worth by which projects are construed as worthy of funding' Drawing on online ethnographic observation at funding events as well as on document analysis, we show how these arrangements are structured by a valorisation of efficiency. We propose to call this bio-efficiency, and relate it to a construal of the world as scarce.
PubDate: 2025-02-26
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2025.12.1.96-118
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2025)
- Making Mining Good: Tracing the semiotics of justification in mineral
exploration and mining
Authors: Tobias Olofsson
Pages: 119 - 142
Abstract: What does it mean for a business or industry to be and do good' And who can count themselves within the good economy' This article investigates the justification of goodness in mineral exploration and mining and uses the entwinement between value creation and destruction characteristic of mining to trouble notions of goodness in impactful industries. Based on analyses of indepth interviews, ethnographic fieldnotes, and archival materials, the article follows the ways in which mining industry actors seek to negotiate contradictions between creation and destruction; and does so while using an innovative conceptual framework based in Peircean semiotics to open up justification for analysis of the underlying semiotic machinery that actors rely on to signify goodness. Mobilizing this conceptual toolkit, the article investigates how miners and explorers emphasize certain values, or signs, over others and how values are used to assert that some mines and miners do more good than others.
PubDate: 2025-02-26
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2025.12.1.119-142
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2025)
- Temporal Layering: How past, future and present intersect in the valuation
of pharmaceutical innovation
Authors: Anna Brueckner Johansen, Susi Geiger, Sarah Wadmann
Pages: 143 - 170
Abstract: We investigate how temporality matters in processes of valuation. Taking our empirical point of departure in the case of a novel gene therapy that has been the centre of a heated pricing debate, we explore how the ‘goodness’ of such a pharmaceutical good was negotiated by researchers, patients, pharmaceutical companies and regulators, and how these negotiations were shaped by the mobilisation of past experiences and future expectations. Seeking to advance the beginning of an analytical sensitivity to temporality in valuation studies, we develop the notion of ‘temporal layering’. We argue that moments of valuation consist of multiple ‘temporal layers’ where select past experiences and future expectations are rendered visible – or left obscure – depending on how these layers are drawn upon in valuation struggles and by whom. Thus, what is at stake in determining the ‘good’ in particular moments of valuation is not just a contest over certain qualities or ways to evaluate an object, but also over which (particular layers of) pasts and futures come to count. We suggest that such fine-grained temporal analysis can provide new openings to questions of valuation for a wide-ranging array of economic objects, particularly for those situated in contemporary bioeconomies.
PubDate: 2025-02-26
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2025.12.1.143-170
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2025)
- On Green Swans and Catastrophic Futures: Climate change as risk and
uncertainty in central banking
Authors: Stine Engen
Pages: 171 - 194
Abstract: This article analyses how central banks understand the financial risks thought to arise from climate change as uncertainty within complex systems rather than risk as something statistically measurable. In line with pragmatic sociology, I investigate what this uncertainty enables, instead of taking it to be an epistemological limit to knowledge. Analysing a 2020 publication by the Bank for International Settlements and Banque de France called ‘The green swan’, I show how ‘climate risk’ is framed as a ‘black swan’, a conceptualization taken from the field of complexity theory, meaning unlikely, extreme events that cannot be predicted, implying a critique of economic expertise. In the figure of the green swan, however, the statistically improbable climate crisis is additionally framed as a certainty. I argue that ‘the green swan’ through this tension works to include critique and value financial climate risk as a ‘good’ in order to provoke a precautionary response on this risk instead of proposing more explicit political measures on climate change. This demonstrates that while uncertainty challenges economic expertise, it also enables the linking together of the ‘good’ of the climate and the ‘good’ of the financial system, bringing them together in the politics of climate change.
PubDate: 2025-02-26
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2025.12.1.171-194
Issue No: Vol. 12, No. 1 (2025)
- Experiences of Digitized Valuation
Authors: Francis Lee, Andrea Mennicken, Jacob Reilley, Malte Ziewitz
Pages: 1 - 8
PubDate: 2024-05-02
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.1-8
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2024)
- Angry Citizens and Black Belt Employees: Cascading classifications of and
around a predictive algorithm
Authors: Lise Justesen, Ursula Plesner
Pages: 9 - 37
Abstract: Over past decades, predictive algorithms have been used extensively as profiling tools in the private sector, but today they are also increasingly entering public sector domains. This article builds on an ethnographic study of the development of a predictive algorithm in a debt collecting public sector organization. The algorithm was designed to profile citizens on the basis of their calculated ‘readiness to pay’ their debt and to guide employees’ case handling according to ‘type’ of citizen. The article examines how the classification of citizens produced by the algorithm was mediated by different visualizations and by organizational actors who superimposed new and different classifications (moral and emotional) onto those provided by the algorithm. The article draws on the concepts of nominal and ordinal classification to identify how intended non-hierarchical classification glides into new hierarchical valuations of both citizens and employees. Classifications were ‘cascading’ – a concept the article develops to account for how classification of and around the algorithm multiplied and had organizational ripple effects. Based on empirical insights, the study advocates an agnostic approach to how algorithmic predictions impact work, organizations, and the situation of profiled individuals. It emphasizes a dynamic and and unstable relationship between algorithms and organizational practices.
PubDate: 2024-05-02
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.9-37
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2024)
- Digital Valuation: Lessons in relevance from the prototyping of a
recommendation app
Authors: Celia Lury, Sophie Day, Andre Simon, Martín Tironi, Matías Valderrama, Scott Wark
Pages: 38 - 59
Abstract: This article describes the use of a prototype recommendation app to explore how users are included and/or excluded in categories of various kinds of ‘People Like You’. In the study, interviews with users of the prototype app indicate that the experience of receiving personalized recommendations isroutinely evaluated in terms of relevance, that is, as either of interest to them or as beside the point, as accurate or inaccurate, with accuracy often understood as recognition of their context(s). We build on the interviews to develop an analysis which suggests that the capacity of recommendation systems to make relevant recommendations is a function of the parallel projections – from the app on one side and users on the other – that are made as part of an interaction order. In developing this analysis, we reflect on the implications of the interaction order for the inclusion and exclusion of users in categories or kinds of people. We highlight the importance of the temporal formatting of interaction as a continuous present for the relation between belonging and belongings, and thus for the creation of a datasset (Beauvisage and Mellett 2020).
PubDate: 2024-05-02
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.38-59
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2024)
- Valuing Data: Attaching online data to stakes, selves, and other data
Authors: Susann Wagenknecht, Laura Kocksch, Stefan Laser, Ann-Kristin Kühnen
Pages: 60 - 90
Abstract: As datafication proceeds rapidly, a large, unwieldy amount of data is available online. In this article, we ask: How valuable is this data, how is it made valuable' To answer this question, we study how online data is endowed with worth in virtual collaboration workshops. Our workshops challenged participants to assert and question the worth of online data – a challenge that participants addressed by using a set of techniques of which we describe collage, hierarchy building, and calculation. Data, we show, gains value through attachment. Thinking with attachment, we foreground affect, materiality, and the situatedness of valuing online data. As ethnographers, we study how data, as haphazard as it comes, is attached to the circumstances and stakes at hand, to ourselves and to other data. Our study contributes a conceptual perspective that attends to the shifting boundaries of the personal and the public, tensions between locality and generality, the role of contiguity, and the limits of combinatorial connectivity.
PubDate: 2024-05-02
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.60-90
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2024)
- Judging by the Rules' The emergence of evaluation practices
Authors: Stacy Lom
Pages: 91 - 137
Abstract: How does evaluation work differently, and how do evaluation practices emerge, in different contexts' Drawing on a mixed-methods study of evaluation in figure skating and classical music, I discuss the divergent evaluative cultures in these settings, especially in terms of how formal and standardized they are, to consider how and why evaluation practices change over time and why different settings use different evaluation practices. I emphasize the importance of organizational structure, including context, competition structure, degree of centralization, and governance structure. My findings suggest that highly centralized settings governed by more powerful organizations and where competitions build on each other tend to use more formal and standardized evaluation practices compared to other settings with fewer constraints. Understanding how evaluation practices develop and what they look like in different contexts is important because in addition to influencing the objects of evaluation and perceived fairness and legitimacy, these practices often affect outcomes, which have significant consequences for participants.
PubDate: 2024-05-02
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.91-137
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2024)
- Contested Commensuration: The case of a valuation instrument for
historical buildings
Authors: Tineke C. Van der Schoor, Alexander Peine, Harro van Lente
Pages: 138 - 161
Abstract: Environmental values are becoming increasingly important in restoration of historical buildings, while energy interventions can seriously damage historical qualities. Cultural-historical values and environmental values are often considered difficult to commensurate, with energy engineers and heritage experts adhering to widely differing values and relating to different discourses. Valuation instruments are devised to deal with such value conflicts in restoration projects. In this article we study what such instruments perform in the case of assessing historical buildings. We ask how these instruments work, and how they afford, support and guide valuation processes' Furthermore, we enquire what is achieved and what is lost in the reconciliation of values. Theoretically, we start from the notion of commensuration, which allows comparison of values through a shared metric. Empirically, this research note examines the history and use of DuMo, an instrument that aims to reconcile cultural – historical and environmental values and provides a range of sustainable restoration strategies. We find that DuMo indeed performs commensuration of these conflicting values, but also keeps intact the epistemic authority of the two professions. Our claim thus is that valuation instruments can successfully perform commensuration while at the same being contested by involved professionals.
PubDate: 2024-05-02
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.138-161
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2024)
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